Soyo SYKT400 Dragon Ultra vs. Shuttle AK37GTR - Page 4

As an avid gamer, I was really
interested in seeing the 3D performance, both in synthetic
tests, and in real-world scores. For the synthetic
tests, we chose MadOnion's 3DMark 2001 SE. It
generates a score after rendering scenes and measuring
performance using the MaxFX game engine, found in Remedy's
popular game Max Payne. We ran
two series of tests, once at 800x600 with 32-bit color and
again at 1024x768x32, both times with all other program
settings left at their defaults.

High scores all around, with
the Asus board holding the slightest of leads over the
Soyo KT400, at least at stock speeds. The scores
really took a nosedive, however, when running the tests again while
using DDR400 memory. Overclocking each board
resulted in a 350 point increase for the Soyo Dragon,
pushing it over the 14,000 mark, and a 520 point increase
for the Shuttle board. Strangely, this increase
still put in behind the score obtained at stock speeds
with the Asus A7V333.

The differences we saw at
1024x768 were much less evident than at 800x600, although
the order did not change. The Asus A7V333 maintained
a 200 point lead over the Soyo board, which in turn was
500 points ahead of the Shuttle. Overclocking the
two boards brought them closer together, with only a 270
point disparity.

Performance Comparisons with Comanche
4 Demo

Some hardcore
gaming for you grunts

Another popular DirectX
benchmarking program is NovaLogic's Comanche 4. Since
this benchmark is more CPU dependant than other games, we
can get a good feel for the overall system performance by
comparing the benchmarked results.

The Asus A7V333 and the Soyo
KT400 were in a tight race, with the Asus taking the lead
by a mere 0.07 frames per second. The Shuttle board
came in at a full frame behind the other two boards.
When we switched over to DDR400 on the KT400-based boards,
we also lost close to a full frame. When we raised
the FSB, we pumped out almost 3 extra frames per second on
the each board.

Performance Comparisons with Quake 3
Arena v1.17

And once again,
the fan favorite!

We used the Quake 3 Timedemo with the display
settings set to their minimums and the screen resolution at
640x480x16 for the Low Quality graphs and then chose
1024x768 with 32-bit color for the High Quality tests.
This helped determine the CPU
limitations of a motherboard by minimizing the impact the
video card has on the performance of the game. With the
display settings calibrated in this manner, the ability of
the game to tax the video card is virtually eliminated,
allowing the benchmark to focus almost solely on the
motherboard's CPU performance.

At the lowest quality
settings, the demo completed quickly, and we saw more of
the same. While the Asus board still commanded a
lead, the Soyo was close behind, but the Shuttle was a
distant third. In this test, the Shuttle was a full
10 frames behind the other two boards. Again, the
DDR400 scores were much lower than those obtained using
DDR333. It is becoming quite apparent that DDR400's
time has not yet arrived. Overclocking the Soyo
Dragon gave us a great benchmark of 329.9 fps, 17% over
the original score.

The scores were close again,
but if you look closely, the Asus A7V333 score at 133MHz
FSB actually managed to beat the Shuttle board, which had
been overclocked to 141MHz. The Soyo board started
out only 4 frames per second behind the Asus board, but
easily leaped past it, posting up 307.4 fps when
overclocked to 145MHz.

"Real World" Performance with
the Stones

Simulated
Application Performance

Business Winstone is an application-based benchmark,
which runs through a series of scripts using
popular business programs. It
attempts to emulate a business system load, and then
give a rating. We left the default setting so that
these scripts were done five times and the final
score given on the left.

Content Creation
Winstone 2002 is another application-based
benchmark, this time using popular content creation
programs that are considered more "bandwidth hungry". It keeps these multiple
applications open and switches among them while
running scripts.

The Content Creation
Winstone tests include:

Adobe
Photoshop 6.0.1

Adobe
Premiere 6.0

Macromedia Director 8.5

Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev 4

Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055

Netscape
Navigator 6/6.01

Sonic
Foundry Sound Forge 5.0c (build 184)

Each graph told us
practically the same story. The Asus A7V333,
while based on the KT333 chipset, managed to
outperform the two KT400 based boards in almost
every test. The Business Winstone 2001
benchmark was the only test in which the Soyo KT400
Dragon managed to usurp the title from the Asus
board, whilst the Shuttle board managed third place
finishes, consistently a step behind the others.
When the same stick of RAM was set to 200MHz instead
of 166MHz, the performance dropped across the board.

CONCLUSION:

It's hard for us to really
shake the feeling that the KT400 just isn't all that
it's cracked up to be. DDR400 was not officially
supported, and it is very clear why, performance
simply drops in every aspect when setting memory
speeds to 200MHz. In fact, the Shuttle became
quite flaky when using DDR400, and it took many
attempts to complete some of these benchmarks.
While we did not have a chance to try an AGP 8X
capable graphics card in this round of testing, our
current analysis is that there are negligible gains using AGP 8X Mode. What is especially bothersome is
that two KT400 machines were beaten here on occasion, by a KT333
board using the same components installed in the same
exact way. This could be due to a robust BIOS
from Asus, while the early entries from Soyo and
Shuttle still needed some tweaking. Perhaps
later BIOS revisions will correct some of these
issues.

Soyo
SY-KT400 Dragon Ultra

Arguably one of the finest
looking boards we have seen, and it comes with many
features. The performance was top-notch although
it couldn't beat the KT333 board we used as a
reference. Although it doesn't
officially support DDR400, it did not raise any
stability issues when clocking the memory at 200MHz,
but the performance level was quite poor. We did
have good luck with overclocking, however, and managed
to get an extra 10% in the FSB. A major
detraction, however, has to be the price point.
The cheapest we found the Dragon Ultra set for on
Pricewatch,
was $154.00, a little pricey in our books. The
board itself without all the extras was listed in the
$120-130 range.

Great looking board

6-channel
on-board audio

Active
heatsink on NB

Include Sigma
breakout box

High price tag

DDR400 = poor
performance

Was a real
screamer

Long
boot/reboot times

Shuttle
AK37GTR

Another good looking board
that would look great when paired with a Hercules' 3D
Prophet 9700 and Fortissimo III, all based on blue
PCBs. While the performance wasn't as great as
the Soyo Dragon, it also doesn't cost as much.
Then again, there weren't many items in the bundle
either. We had a hard time finding it out there
in the retail channels, but generally we would expect
a sub-$100 price point. Again, DDR400 was not
officially supported, but we suffered through such
instability, we started to question whether or not we
would complete the benchmarks. All in all, a
good performer at a good price.